This is the second of two parts. The first can be found here!
HW: Twenty years!!!! That’s fucking crazy that it's been twenty years since you read this book, because it's been twenty years since I read it, too—to the season, I'm pretty sure, if not to the month. (Now I've got Amanda from ANTM saying her son was “conceived to the hour of Sept. 11” looping in my head.) Charlotte, not to make you feel bad, but Jamie and I went to a Halloween party without you this past weekend at our friend, Ashley Reese's, house. I bring this up not to be cruel but because at one point in the backyard, in between cackling at TikToks about how "to be a woman is to perform," we circled back to the subject, “would we have been friends in high school?” Yes, very likely, which naturally gave way to—“would we have hooked up?” (Probably, but only once and out of some teenage scarcity logic, i.e., “we're both here.”)
Speaking of twenty years ago—Charlotte, your use of “fridging” smacked me right back into the era of feminist blogs and sincere usage of the word “problematic.” Wow. Literally. Haven't heard that name in years. Was it because a comic book superhero was spurred into a narrative arc because his girlfriend was killed and stuffed in a fridge? I could google it, but I won't, because out of respect for that particular blogospheric nostalgia, I'd really like it if either of you called me in, reminded me that it's not your job to educate me, and told me that google is free.
Call ins, call outs…Remember when in—I don't know—2015? 2016? everyone suddenly stopped calling it “call out culture” and started calling it “cancel culture?” That was so funny. I think about that all the time, and why it might've happened. (My working theory is that the shift reflects a similar shift of users from one social media platform to another, from call-out central Tumblr to cancellation HQ Twitter.) I'm also, for lack of a less stupid segue, thinking about how “cancellation” or whatever works in Interview With a Vampire. Is it in the book that Armand (or maybe Lestat?) tells Louis that he wants him to be his definitely-not-sexual-at-all partner for eternity, because to be alone for decades or centuries on this Earth is a worse loneliness than can be conceived? (Or was that Lestat in the TV show, when Claudia's sort of interrogating him over a game of chess...) The truncated nature of the new AMC series' timeline doesn't let us find out.
Charlotte, your comments on Claudia's rape and its catalyzation of her character development made me think about sexual violence as a narrative device—how, in the books, Claudia became wiser and more self-possessed because she had many decades to do so (six or seven decades, I believe), whereas TV Claudia, having been born only a hundred-or-so years before Louis’s interview in Dubai, quite literally doesn't have that kind of time. It didn't feel like a full-on “fridging” of the character when I watched it the first time, or even the second time TBH, but your take has shifted my view. Because the writers/showrunners/creator/whoever began their adaptation in the early 1900s, rather than the late 1700s, they needed to speed up her psychological maturation and settled on the ol' stand-by: violation-into-womanhood. Speaking of which, Jamie, fuck that “welcome to womanhood” lady. I officially unwelcome her to womanhood. May she roam the ruined castles of Transylvania sucking the blood out of rats or whatever.
I still don't know why they moved the series’ timeline forward as they have, however fantastic a job they do with the early 20th century. Maybe, in rewriting Louis’ character as Black, they wanted to sidestep the depiction of him as a wealthy landowner who owned enslaved people, like how (white, plantation owner) Louis does in the books. There’s a lot the series adaptation does with respect to his relation to labor. In the show, he not only compensates his workers, who are now a multiracial group of female sex workers, but he moreover grants them partial ownership of the brothel to circumvent some kind of targeted Jim Crow law, the mechanics of which made sense when I was watching the episode, but have since dissolved in my mind.
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